Notes: Edge of the Galaxy Pt. 2
How Merei Spanjaf became a much more interesting character
Let’s continue diving into the writing, storytelling and continuity behind Servants of the Empire: Edge of the Galaxy. Here’s the first installment if you missed it.
WARNING: These notes will completely spoil the book. If you haven’t read it, stop and pick up a copy here.
Part 1: Fall
Time to meet some key members of our cast – Merei Spanjaf, Beck Ollet, Athletic Director Fhurek and the other players on the AppSci SaberCats. And how about an introduction to grav-ball?
No character changed more in developing Edge of the Galaxy than Merei. Originally she wasn’t a member of the SaberCats, but a stats junkie who’d help Zare figure out how to beat other teams by crunching numbers and formulating strategies. That role paired her with a counterweight, a character who disappeared from the story. Rattle was a retired clone trooper living out his days as a janitor at AppSci, and I wanted him to help Zare by imparting leadership lessons from the Clone Wars, which Zare would use in the grav-ball huddle.
I thought that would be an interesting way to explore tactics and leadership – and offer a satirical take on modern sports. Over the last couple of decades, sports have been remade by the use of advanced stats, fueling a rancorous debate. To oversimplify rather thoroughly, you’ve got stat geeks searching for new ways to understand sports and gain an edge, and traditionalists who wax rhapsodic about character, effort and the will to win. Merei and Rattle would represent the two poles of that debate and let me satirize it.
But the Rebels creative team nixed using a retired clone, warning that it would scoop a storyline they were developing for Season 2. (That was an interesting thing to learn!) Rebels executive producer Greg Weisman then asked why Merei wasn’t on the team. That struck him as unfair: We were writing a space fantasy but still saying girls couldn’t play?
I admit that I resisted the idea, which embarrasses me now. I think my hang-up was being too invested in my original conception of Merei. My sports satire wouldn’t work if she were actually on the team, but I couldn’t get it through my head that without Rattle, the satire was DOA and Merei’s character needed to evolve.
Eventually my patient editor Joanne Chan Taylor got me to see I was being ridiculous and Greg was right. In fact, he was more than right: putting Merei on the team helped the story immediately. It strengthened Merei’s bond with Zare and Beck and made her a natural participant in scenes where otherwise she would have needed to be shoehorned in.
Once I was forced to rethink Merei, she became a more dynamic, assertive character. That saved me later in the series: for stretches of Rebel in the Ranks and Imperial Justice, Zare’s Academy duties left him stuck in place in terms of storytelling. In those books I found myself relying heavily on Merei to carry the story forward, which would have been difficult from my original starting point.
I learned some valuable lessons from all this. For one thing, don’t get so focused on one idea that you cling to it and miss a better one. For another, collaboration – with an editor or outside readers – leads to new possibilities. In this case, Greg’s question opened up a lot of potential I foolishly might have kept closed off.
About grav-ball: I’m a baseball fan, but baseball’s too individual a sport to be effective as a meditation on leadership, tactics and sports as war. So my starting point for grav-ball was American football. I wanted a more tiring, less-specialized game, so I added some elements of hockey. Some readers have seen quidditch as an influence, since it also has a keeper and a circular goal, but that didn’t occur to me, or at least not consciously: I borrowed the goal, scoring circle and limitations on player movement from a basketball variant called netball. (More about grav-ball here.)
Grav-ball existed in the old Expanded Universe – we see it played in the Baron Fel comics from Dark Horse. I re-read those stories, but dumped the Legends depiction of players wearing hover-boots. It looked cool on the page but struck me as making something “spacey” for its own sake, which forces you work uphill as a storyteller.
Here’s my objection to spacey stuff: the more you ask the audience to process something unfamiliar, the harder it is to get them to connect with the characters and story, which is Job One for the author. Think of the iconic scene where Luke stares at the sunset on Tatooine. Could you set that scene in zero-gravity, or with multiple blue supergiants in the sky, or with Luke in pressurized armor? I suppose, but you’d be throwing a lot of distractions at the viewer. The scene works because it’s so simple and universal: everyone in the audience knows what Luke’s feeling and identifies with him. Yes, the twin suns are a bit of sci-fi window dressing, but the viewer processes them in a second and goes back to thinking about what’s important. You make things spacey at your peril.
Anyway, in Edge of the Galaxy we soon arrive at the orchardlands and another theme of the series: the destruction wrought by the Empire in strip-mining Lothal. Beck feels this deeply; so will Holshef and Old Jho, and even minor characters will note intensifying dust storms as the series goes on.
Note the scent of jogan blossom is introduced very early – that’s a key element at the very end of The Secret Academy. I had that plot twist in mind from the start, and so was able to build up to it. That’s a basic author’s trick: figure out the punch line and work backwards to set up the joke. Like all tricks, once you know how it works it’s almost embarrassingly easy. Just takes planning and practice.
The sports-as-war metaphor gets a workout between Zare’s conversations with Dhara and Fhurek. Dhara says Zare’s already training to be an officer, mentioning teamwork, leadership, strategy and discipline. Then, a chapter later, Fhurek gives Zare much the same speech. That’s another writer’s trick: ideally, a scene should accomplish two things at once. Fhurek reiterating what Dhara says in a somewhat different context deepens the sports-as-war connection but also makes Zare worry that his sister is becoming part of the Imperial machine.
Quick points from Part 1:
Merei’s last name, Spanjaf, is a tip of the cap to my Brooklyn pals Emma Span and Jay Jaffe, both ace Sports Illustrated writers. The stats vs. heart sports joke got dropped, but the name remained.
A few traces of the stats vs. heart idea did survive: Coach Ramset talks in sports clichés while Merei warns Zare about confirmation bias, for instance. But honestly, those traces are all we need. More would have been showing off for a very small subset of the audience at the expense of everyone else.
Seriously, Greg and Joanne saved me from myself. Merei is one of readers’ favorite characters from Servants of the Empire, for which I’m grateful – but if I’d gotten my way she would have been a minor character used in service of a not particularly interesting in-joke. If an idea you’re in love with is peripheral to the story, let it go. It will just get in the way of what the story needs more.
Oh, almost forgot: I pronounce Merei’s name “muh-RAY.” But if you want to say “Merry,” go right ahead. Or alternate the two pronunciations randomly. (Hahn, HAN, Lee-ah, Lay-uh, let’s call the whole thing off.)
Reader reactions to the importance of sports in Edge of the Galaxy were interesting, to say the least. A few readers loved the idea of a Star Wars sports tale. Most folks were neutral, accepting the SaberCats as an microcosm of the Empire and making their own judgments about whether or not the story worked. But to my surprise, the presence of sports was a deal-breaker for some readers, who dismissed “sportsball” as part of the world they wanted Star Wars to be an escape from. (I climbed on my soapbox about that here.)
Zare’s classroom encounter with Tralls is an early warning sign of what’s to come. Tralls doesn’t really dispute that his facts are inaccurate – the point of his class is to impart ideological lessons, with facts subordinate or simply falsified. Zare finds this disturbing, as he should – it’s an early sign of what’s to come.
Note Merei is from Corulag and has a Core accent. That’s going back to the themes of class division and the tension between Lothal’s established settlers and new arrivals.
Why do grav-ball coaches only get one time-out per period? Because I needed to avoid draggy arguments between Zare and Coach Ramset, and to keep a sports-savvy reader from wondering how Zare could get away with ignoring his coach’s plays. If you’ve got a logical bug in your storytelling, sometimes you can make it a feature. But it better be a plausible feature.
That’s also why I made the Empire’s data systems hastily established and less secure than they should be. I didn’t want to have to choose between sidetracking the story with an in-depth explanation of Merei’s hacking and the kind of ZOMG I’M TYPING insta-hacking you see in too many stories. There’ll be a carefully described hack in Rebel in the Ranks, where it fits better; for now, Merei gets access to a limited set of information.
Beck is a third-generation Lothalite whose parents have sold their homestead and jogan-fruit orchard to the Empire. Besides serving the oldtimers vs. newcomers theme, Beck acts as the conscience of the planet – many characters in the story will note the Empire’s ravaging of Lothal’s ecosystem, but for Beck it’s deeper and more personal, because it’s erasing the life he holds dear.
I liked the little detail about needing blasters to keep off the Loth-wolves. Beck’s probably talking about his parents’ or grandparents’ time, but that line gives Lothal some history and makes the sense of loss deeper.
Jumpspeeders were introduced in The Clone Wars – Ahsoka rides one in the Mortis episodes. Think of them as speeder-bike Vespas, but capable of more speed.
Dhara’s warning about datapads that can’t be taken out of rooms without triggering alarms comes into play in “Breaking Ranks.” That’s how Zare knows the danger and warns Ezra.
The Barchetta River is not an idly chosen name, but an homage so dorky and shameless that I’m shocked no one has called me out for it.
In the game against East City, the referee derides Zare as coming from some fancy planet. Class and new vs. old again.
Beck says “kriffing,” that EU stand-in for profanity, and later says “stang,” a space swear word that dates back to Princess Leia being a potty-mouth in Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. In hindsight, I regret bringing back “kriffing” – “stang” is a lot more artful.